Seeing red, looking blue, feeling green

Julian Lloyd Webber

12:01AM BST 06 Jul 2006

Julian Lloyd Webber on his love of Kandinsky, the artist who saw colours when he heard music, and heard music when he saw colours

'Never take LSD," advised an acquaintance well versed in these things, "because, if you do and you listen to music, it will never seem as good again." For 25 years I've lived with this tantalising statement.

What, I wonder, am I missing? Would the "delights" of Offenbach's irritating Barcarolle finally be revealed? Would the shattering climax of Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony "do my head in"? Or would a drug-fuelled encounter involving an open window and that maddening British Airways tune result in my early demise?

Such thoughts were rekindled by the current Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern. Not that I'm suggesting the great man dabbled in mind-bending substances. It's just that, when it came to music, he was prone to such utterances as, "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were stretched in front of me."

As explained in Arts+Books last month, Kandinsky was a synaesthete, which means that when he heard music he saw colours, and when he saw colours he heard music. Perhaps this explains why I like his paintings so much - although he also loved (and played) the cello, which he considered "the deepest blue of any instrument".

I fell in love with Kandinsky when I was 11. My Aunt Vi took me to an exhibition of his work, and there was one painting that I have never forgotten. Shaped like a sphere, it consisted of extraordinarily subtle variations of the colour green. I stood gazing at it for ages without, however, experiencing the key of B major which apparently would wash all over the composer Scriabin whenever he saw that colour.

Scriabin was a key exponent of synaesthesia when it was all the rage in the early years of the last century. His Poem of Fire (not to be confused with his Poem of Ecstasy, which, I understand, goes down a treat in the clubs) came complete with an embryonic laser display linking different notes to different colours and an instruction to the audience to wear white "in order to enhance the experience".

Unfortunately, such "experiences" were rarely successful. When Arthur Bliss produced his own Colour Symphony for the1922 Three Choirs Festival, the Times critic complained: "I found myself referring to the programme to find out whether I ought to be seeing red or looking blue and some of it made the audience feel green."

• Aunt Vi may have introduced me to Kandinsky, but she did her level best to put my brother Andrew off The Sound of Music.

When the musical opened in the West End in 1961, it boasted a fiftysomething Mary Martin capering about the stage as the teenage Maria and was critically mauled. Vi, a former actress with a penchant for writing saucy cookbooks, thought it was one of the greatest disasters the West End had ever seen.

Andrew recounts this story during the first episode of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, the series that BBC1 will air on Saturday evenings as a prelude to his new production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic.

There were some predictable squeals of disapproval when it was announced that the programme aimed to cast a lead West End role via reality TV. Yet the promise of instant stardom can unearth genuine talent from the unlikeliest of places. Thousands of potential Marias were whittled down to the 20 showcased at Andrew's home.

From these, 10 were selected to go through the gruelling process of trial by TV, with the viewers choosing the winner. Happily, the money generated by viewers' phone calls (estimated at £3-4 million) will be ploughed back into music education.

With the BBC's Young Musician of the Year looking as tired and formulaic as Top of the Pops, a classical version of a show that really engages today's television audience with young instrumentalists is sorely needed.

Julian Lloyd Webber's new CD, 'Unexpected Songs' (EMI Classics), was released this week.